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“The Twitter Thinkpiece” has been quite popular since the creation of the Internet’s favourite 140 character a post social network service. The Twitter Thinkpiece (TTT) came into being in the form of short articles ridiculing the service as a whole: What’s the point of 140 character messages? Who needs to know who ate what and when? What’s with the birds and fail whales?

But from those humble beginnings in the “Internet, you so silly” sections of more or less respectable media platforms and publications TTT has developed into one of the fundamental genres of texts on the Internet, right next to listicles full of GIFs, anti-feminist/anti-progressive nonsense blogs and “that forum conversation where two people argue the same inconsistent points for 34 pages, till everyone else has lost their will to live and talk”.

We all remember the good old times when Twitter’s popularity forced every public intellectual to point out how useless, how populistic, how anti-thinking 140 character messages were. How every meaningful argument needed a book or at least an article in a respected journal or print product and how Twitter as a service was illustrating just how stupid the Internet would make all those young whippersnappers using it all day on their “smart”phones. And don’t you forget putting the smart into ironic quotation marks!

After a while things settled down, Twitter was just there, sitting at the bar, feeling smug and plastering their share buttons all over the Internet. Some people used Twitter, some didn’t and everyone could have lived happily ever after. If there hadn’t been investors fucking shit up. As they tend to do.

Twitter had gotten a whole lot of money from Venture capitalists and they needed to see some returns quick. And not returns as any sort of reasonable business could generate. The kind of returns you can only make by selling some online thing to an even bigger online thing or – even better – to a clueless old giant from meatspace. So Twitter did what most people in that kind of pinch would have done: They tried following the simple metrics that their investors would understand. Clicks. Accounts. Followers of Brands. Made up little numbers that would go up, up and up until the money fairy would free Twitter from its misery.

In between the changes Twitter introduced to be more compatible for the mass market of stars and brands and mostly silent consumers (for example Promoted Tweets) and those they actively didn’t (anti-harassment tools don’t make sense when that could really bring your “active users” number down) we have created online what physicists haven’t managed for centuries: We have build a perpetuum thinkpiece-mobile.

The generic Twitter thinkpiece works like this and can be deployed about every 2 weeks:

No rest for troubled Twitter: After a lackluster financial year Twitter earned a lot of pushback by its users for changing _________. This change is seen by many as going against the service’s nature leading to the creation of the hashtag ________.

pointed out that the proposed changes would make Twitter less useful and would destroy its community.

Twitter has been trying to grow its user base in the past _____ months by __________ but hasn’t managed to come even close to the numbers Facebook has. The service has also been in the news lately for harboring large amounts

[ ] add the feature ______________
[ ] remove the feature ______________
[ ] Allow me and the likes of me to pay to get rid of ads and become paradise
[ ] all of the above

The TTT as a literary genre is tempting: There are always fingers ready to click any sort of TTT. Because Twitter users really care about the service more than most users of other services. The template for a TTT is very simply structured making it easy to churn them out while offering enough places to merge your TTT with that essay on general theory of techology, data, the evils of the digital space, cat GIFs or the human condition that you’ve not finished.

Many of the digital elite (or those wanting to be in it) have a strange, kind of abusive love-hate relationship with Twitter. Which is easy to understand: I personally have met maybe the most brilliant, warm and wonderful people on Twitter whose replies to me swim in a sea of anti-progressive, anti-feminist, libertarian filth that makes you wonder how any kind of society could ever emerge in human populations.

But the problem isn’t Twitter. Twitter is highly problematic in the way it constantly refuses to do anything to protects its users from harassment, but even if that was fixed the general problem was still there: We don’t really know how to run public infrastructure online at scale.

Twitter, not the company or the product but the service as an idea, as a thing creating simple ways to share short ideas of texts to subscribers should be public infrastructure. Because as some many hashtags or organisations show: There is so much need for something that allows people to form tightly-knit but still potentially public structures without needing traditional entities of power to generate reach.

We could build an open and free standard, some might say, like Email but if you’ve ever run your own email server you know how much work it is to prevent it from becoming a source for spam, And that doesn’t mean that you have filtered out the incoming spam to your user’s addresses. Sure you can run your own email server if you have skills and time and resources to pay for a server but today if you want email to actually work you go to Gmail or maybe … I don’t know. There are probably other providers with relevant numbers. Is Hotmail still a thing?

The TTT is popular because it’s easy: Point out obvious flaws in a product of a company being slowly grinded to dust between what vocal power users want, what people expect them to do to protect their users and the wishes of their customers and investors. Now just decide whether you want to make this an obituary (which you know is total hogwash because people will stick to any shitty service as long as the service can generate social capital [it’s called: the MySpace Rule]) or just throw some random feature requests their way with the promise that while all the other changes they made were destroying the nature and soul of the service yours will just create unicorns and rainbows for everybody.

I’m not convinced that Twitter’s (the Company and their product) “nature” or “soul” is really anything worth saving: Marc Andreessen, that Breitbart Troll or all those tiny hate machines with the egg avatars might actually be part of Twitter’s soul. The filthy underbelly of the beast. And no amount of TTT will ever fix that.